So that Aramax and Moonlake's weekly progress log isn't alone, I am going to start documenting my progress in the Cosmic Era. This will a sort of directors commentary for the submissions as I complete them.

InspirationsWhat I hoped to achieve with the pieceWhy I wrote itWhat I was drinking when I wrote itProgress updates and relations to the novel (In macro-edit phase)

A little thing that popped up in my Facebook feed, I read through the ideas of the scientists, futurists, and frequent commentators on science shows and found that their projections for the future meshed up well with the things that I had written thus far about the Cosmic Era as well as pointing out a few things that are missing. One of the next things to come from this is going to be a look into the currency and economic models of the Cosmic Era, with emphasis on a post-scarcity, post-capitalist, pro-state, pro-evironment, AI controlled economy and regulated currency.

A quick one off generated from Dr. Kaku of the futurist submission. Most sci-fi and dystopian setting have some sort of electronic drug, and most are stupid because it seems like none of the writers has ever had any sort of drug or substance abuse problem. Which is kind of odd considering the legacy or traditional of alcoholism in writers. Heck, most of Stephen King's early works were covered in a fine patina of cocaine dust.

I smoked, I quit smoking, I think I have a bit of an understanding on addiction and substance abuse.

Archery is cool, and in the comic book universe, the bow is the next most powerful weapon compared to the bare fist. Guns are only slightly more useless than WMDs. If Rambo can shoot down gunships with a compound bow, and Hawkeye can drop helicarriers with a bow, they have a place in the Cosmic Era, even if it is a very small niche

The nanoforge, the replicator, and all of those other sci-fi instamatic devices are coming true with 3D printing technology. The future isn't swirling lights and there it is, it is extruded and heat/UV set, in quick and easy to assemble pieces. I have some first hand experience with 3D printers, the new thing in prop and replica making is to create a digital master file, from computer designed art, print the first piece out, clean it up, and use it to make traditional silicon molds for resin and plaster casting.

Another quickie from the hip submission. There's not much to it, other than establishing a metric to measure the sharing of information. In the CE that's important because data is the new default backing for financial systems.

One of the trends I have started running with is taking what are functionally generic sci-fi items, that have traditionally generic and boring names and giving them a CE write up and a German based name. Why German? Because the highly technical, industrious, and precise Germans are a major industrial force behind the Atlantic Federation.

Another thing is that generic names are boring as s**t yo. Real world items tend to have names drawn from ethnic sources, corporate sources, or colloquial sources.

Tissue? Nope, it's a kleenex.Cotton swab? Nope, hand me a Q-tipMP3 player, That's what you buy at the Dollar Mart, you have an iPod, whatever make and manufacture it is.

This was a topic I had rolling around in my head for a while, and there are some potential short stories that can be written from it. What if someone could steal you, make duplicates of you, and the whole pulp aspect comes into a play. You go to the salon for a dream vacation, and wake up in a slave freighter heading to an asteroid mining colony. Do you know you've been duplicated, do you think the simulation has gone bad, do you have special corporate training to deal with this sort of data breach?

Pheno comes from phenotype, or a specific form. Clade comes from classification systems. A clade is sort of like a species but not quite. The organisms inside a clade can all point to a single specific ancestor for a specific trait. Phenocladistics is the tech term for the creation of artificial variations of humanity. This differs from basic one off genetic modding because a phenoclade will breed true.

Inspired by the Host from Dr. Who, and named for a common insult for C-3PO, Goldenrod Autonics (auton robotics)is a conspicuous consumption provider of shiny gold robots. If people are willing to chrome wrap their cars, there is no reason that in the future they won't chrome wrap their robots, their cybernetics, and hell George Lucas chrome wrapped his ships from Naboo.

My 30 Amazons sub has withered on the vine, being in work for creeping up on two years now, and I'm not happy about it. The basic intent was to take 30 female comic, movie, and TV show characters, convert them over to the Cosmic Era setting and go from there. Each entry that I completed was a mini-sub unto itself and my list ended up being more than I wanted to deal with. I think that the biggest issue was that I wanted to keep the core of the character, but threw too much effort into changing them away from the source material. Had I stuck with the Cosmic Era playing with all the toys theme that Axle mentioned it might have been more successful.

Alethia Goodchild is Aeon from the self titled Aeon Flux. Not from the ok Charlize Theron movie, but from my original exposure to the character on MTV's liquid television. It was quirky and weird, Aeon dying in every short, and the stories only made sense in surrealist perspectives and then it was still head scratching and guessing.

It was a source material for the setting, with the augmentation and the blase attitude towards even the most extreme modifications, general strangeness, and the sex being less erotic and more insectile in perspective

I banged out a seven point outline and started working on this submission, I think the inspiration was a link to creepy and haunted abandoned places and I rolled from there. It was never finished because I realized that there was no real reason to push to finish all seven entries, the wastelands of the Cosmic Era don't really need to be fleshed out that much, and thus this sub was left to sit in the in work folder. During a stint of 'cleaning house' I decided to push it out rather than delete it. After the apoc-punk section and the first two entries, the others are just meh.

I was going for an Outer Limits vibe on Derenkuyu, with everything being built on top of lies.

So this kid spent a couple years, a bunch of math, and some Buddhism to 'win' Sim City. He created a city with a population of 6 million with short lifespans, brutal law enforcement, unemployment, poor education and health services, and basically engineered dystopia. What is remarkable about this system is that it was stable. If you've ever played Simcity you know that your city is either growing, broke, shrinking, and otherwise fluctuating. In Vincent's Magnisanti, every building is in use, there are no abandoned areas, and that stability, his model city is stable for tens of thousands of years.

That's just scary.

This is where the Petroleum Era is heading, that is where WE are heading now. Those in power will remain in power, while the rest crowd into high density urban structures, with only public transit, afraid of the police, too dumb to protest, unable to resist or rebel. It is almost a blessing that the fuel runs out and this stability seeking world view dies on it's own blades.

The Cosmic Era is not stable, it is experiencing explosive growth, and for all the horrors that can be found, and all the terrible ways there are to die, it is not what I would consider the most hellish thing, it's not a smog choked urban blightmare

I am going to make a confession here: I love terrible things. I don't love them for what they are, but for the challenge of making them not suck. What is almost guaranteed to fail? Movies about Mars, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four. The Baxter unit is the Cosmic Era treatment for the Fantastic Four. No cosmic radiation to turn them into superheroes (seriously, if this was a thing, the world government would have hero factories in orbit deliberately going through the Van Allen belts. It doesn't matter how many volunteers are killed or mutated, the chance of creating armies of supers is going to be worth the risk, especially if you get to pick who goes up.

If their name is Doom, or Doom appears anywhere in their name, application denied.

So the re-skinned FF are a Cosmic Era strike team, parapsychics and genetic mods. Nothing new is added, but this is how you could convert an existing property into the setting and use it for a campaign. The PC heroes have to fight cosmic horrors, a defector turned desolate one, and then basic mercenary and PR stuff.

There has been a good deal of underwater stuff in the inspiration section, but no one deals with underwater, and even in the novel, no one goes underwater. But it struck me, the Russians in the Cosmic Era. They blend arcanotech with tried and true things. The Russians are fantastic with tanks, submarines, and patriotism.

The Russians are the people who realize that despite borders and such, Earth is a water world, and the oceans can be claimed, colonized, and developed. The morepolozhinye are Russian Aquastats, underwater floating stations. The vibe is similar to space, but underwater and under pressure.

This sub came quick on the heels of the Morepolozhinye sub, recognizing the Russian dominance of the oceans. The original name, morskoiludi is Google Russian for Water People, and was a mouthful. Another Google search gave Rusalka as the Russian translation for mermaid. Rusalkas are Russians who have been turned into an amphibious aquatic plenoclade.

There is a new generation of genetically enhanced humanity coming, but they are in the beta process right now. The inspirations behind homo xenus include the Clans from Battletech, Neo-Sapiens from Exo-Squad, and the ubermensch.

The Clans from Battletech had a culture build around pureborn warriors birthed by machines, looking down on those born from dirty swapping of fluids. They were concerned with their role in their society, and the condition of their genetic legacy. Those who were shamed, those who did not excel were doomed to see their genes shelved, or in some cases, destroyed to ensure that there would not be another like them.

The blue skinned neo-sapiens from Exo-Squad had attitude, and were in almost every way superior to humans. A handful were friendly to humans, and fought along side of them, but the majority took up arms and fought for their masters. They were completely fine with genetic manipulation, even as they created super-intelligent neos, and even animal hybrid neos for hand to hand fighting.

The ubermensch, the superman, is a common theme in transhumanity, with them being better, stronger, smarter, better looking, etc. The great realization for the geneticists was that there was not one specific race or strain of humanity that was innately superior to another, that superior expression of mankind had to be created, and created from scratch. Thus,homo xenus is an entirely new creation.

This was a topic I had rolling around in my head for a while, and there are some potential short stories that can be written from it. What if someone could steal you, make duplicates of you, and the whole pulp aspect comes into a play. You go to the salon for a dream vacation, and wake up in a slave freighter heading to an asteroid mining colony. Do you know you've been duplicated, do you think the simulation has gone bad, do you have special corporate training to deal with this sort of data breach?

Maybe it's because I've been reading a bunch of ePub short stories lately, but can definitely see a tale in this.

You know, something like..

"Hunting Myself"

Two down. Eight more to go. Exo-suicide is what Lacy called it. The first "me" I killed was hard on the psyche, I won't lie. The second, I found myself already detached emotionally. Like regular murder, I suppose. "Me" number two had it coming anyway. This guy was an utter *******.

PoisonAlchemist: Man Muro, you boost my confidence and then you just go crush it with a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Pariah: Don't tell him things like that, if his head gets any bigger he'll float off like a weather ballon :p

So this kid spent a couple years, a bunch of math, and some Buddhism to 'win' Sim City. He created a city with a population of 6 million with short lifespans, brutal law enforcement, unemployment, poor education and health services, and basically engineered dystopia. What is remarkable about this system is that it was stable. If you've ever played Simcity you know that your city is either growing, broke, shrinking, and otherwise fluctuating. In Vincent's Magnisanti, every building is in use, there are no abandoned areas, and that stability, his model city is stable for tens of thousands of years.

That's just scary.

This is where the Petroleum Era is heading, that is where WE are heading now. Those in power will remain in power, while the rest crowd into high density urban structures, with only public transit, afraid of the police, too dumb to protest, unable to resist or rebel. It is almost a blessing that the fuel runs out and this stability seeking world view dies on it's own blades.

The Cosmic Era is not stable, it is experiencing explosive growth, and for all the horrors that can be found, and all the terrible ways there are to die, it is not what I would consider the most hellish thing, it's not a smog choked urban blightmare

Did a big update on this, adding Zola and Loki quotes, as well as a 1984/Petroleum Era glossary section.

I keep finding myself coming back around to the space elevator. In the Galactic Clicker game the Space Elevator technology is a boundary tech, when you buy it, you transition from a planetary level to a solar system level. I guess it makes sense that it is going to be seriously hard to do major work in space when everything that comes up is taking literal tons of fuel to get into orbit.

There are plenty of works dealing with space elevators, and plenty of artwork too. It is interesting, daunting, and I'm not sure how it would fit into the mythos of the Cosmic Era. There are still rockets and mass drivers, so getting into orbit is cheaper, and with A-pods and launching from an aerostat is easier than launching from the ground.

I do keep coming back around to something I wrote earlier, the tether-vator. Rather than a true space elevator, the tether-vator is a space escalator, lifting goods and people from the surface to a floating aerostat complex. The complex is tethered to the ground, and very likely a superstructure like an industrial acroplex. Goods are zipped up the tether to the aerostat. There is a second tether, this one connected to a space station in a locked orbit, where it stays in the same place relative to the ground. It's tether is connected to the aerostat, and the 'stat sends it's goods and passengers up the space tether to the station. Once in orbit, the hard part is over, and small craft and other ships can move the goods from the station to wherever they need to go.

In a few decades or centuries a network of tethers would eventually grow, and a Niven Ring could start to form around the planet. Goods go up the now true aerostat-less elevators to the ring, where a transit system moves the good to another node in the ring, where they are either loaded onto a ship, ferried to a mass driver, or go down another elevator to a different point on the planet.

This is all well down the road and would very likely be the transition from the Cosmic Era to something like a Stellar Era, or Universal Era.

Does it fit the guidelines of the Cosmic era?[url]http://strolen.com/viewing/7_Things_About_Writing_for_the_Cosmic_Era[/url

Is it for sale? - yes. Using the tether-vator is a for profit operation. You don't buy the system, you lease a spot on it, or you buy a ticket. Also, with the size and function of the system, it is easy to attach antenna for broadcasting, or a cable for secure data and hardline communications, all of which come at a premium cost.

Life is cheap? - probably quite a few people died during it's construction, and there are certainly accidents, but they do not stop the operation of the system

Sex is everything? - phallic image?

Frantic Pace? - the tether-vator doesn't stop. There is always a steady flow of goods and passengers going back and forth. Cue the Futurama and Jetson's pneumatic transit tubes

Antique Values? - not sure about this one

Nothing is Real? - the tether-vator looks like a solid thing, but it is a number of flexible components. It looks solid, but it can move, it can move a lot. It's all dangling bits hanging from things, it's a rope hanging from the gym roof.

Everything is terrible - The tether-vator is an eyesore, it is horrible to ride on, like a swaying roller coaster that constantly feels like it's about to go off the tracks, if there is a problem, you could suffocate before help arrives. EM radiation from the magnets driving it, the disturbing socio-economic power of the Tethervator operating corp or govt agency

Bones are not that important, since you don't have to deal with gravity. Who needs arms and legs if tentacles are superior? Also, lacking gravity to pack everything together, the spine decompresses, and going back to gravity can cause spinal injuries as everything pulls back together. The alternative, cartilaginous spines? bionics that resist separation, moving to a body shape that doesn't require bones to hold it's shape. The alternate form could more resemble something from the ocean than anything that walks on land. The downside is that this clade would likely be unable to survive in a high gravity environment, or would require an exoskeleton suit to do so (while still finding it very uncomfortable)

(astronauts lose 1-2% bone mass a month in space)

Space on a space ship is a commodity, smaller people require less space and less resources to support. A neotenic phenoclade could retain a child like size and mass while attaining a full level of mental and emotional development. With automation and robots, the need for brute strength goes away. Also, with the decreased need for bones, tentacles can be very strong while being small compared to a normal human limb

One large strong heart isn't going to cut it. The circulatory system is based on gravity and muscular resistance. In space, a heart loses mass and blood pressure drops. The phenoclade would need an augmented circulatory system. This could be having a multi-heart system like some nematodes and shellfish, or adopting full on cybernetics, and having a bionic heart to maintain the needed level of blood pressure.

The immune system functions less in space, and would need to augmented. The options would include either a higher powered system, or a bionically supplemented one.

The blood pressure thing again, no erections in space, plus embryos don't develop correctly in zero g. While the multiple heart or cybernetic heart can deal with the blood pressure issue, it doesn't do anything for the embryo issue. Well, this might be the part where Homo Xenus, gestated in a machine (which could possibly just spin the embryos to generate centrifugal force) would thrive while man does not.

The economy of the Atlantic Federation is a mix of universal basic income, free to play/pay2win gaming, and post-scarcity digital abundance.

I don't expect this sub to get a lot of attention, it's economic in nature, and the evil within isn't the tentacle dripping sanity shredding kind, just the callous pragmatic kind that we are all too used to.

I've been thinking about this piece for a while, tandem currencies like in the freemium games, and what sort of economy would exist after Capitalism, after America, post scarcity.

One of the things I have to admit about myself is that I am a foodie, down to growing the heirloom and GMO free plants in my backyard garden. For a variety of mostly health related reasons I started educating myself about what I was eating and why it was making me functionally sick (gall bladder and hypertension).

This lead me to learn more about our food chain, and how and what we eat and frankly our food today can be horrific. Chicken nuggets are gross, pink slime is straight out of a horror movie, and what is done to fruits and vegetables is a travesty.

Throw this in with some things I've read on the future of food, and it's looking grim. A few of the things in the article are drawn from sci-fi sources, such as the Judge Dredd referenced recycled food. The rest is straight out of the supermarket.

PoisonAlchemist: Man Muro, you boost my confidence and then you just go crush it with a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Pariah: Don't tell him things like that, if his head gets any bigger he'll float off like a weather ballon :p